Some very inter­est­ing brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket news:

1) Sci­en­tific Learn­ing To Buy Out Soliloquy

- “Sci­en­tific Learn­ing Corp. has announced that it will acquire Solil­o­quy Learn­ing from JTT Hold­ings. Both Sci­en­tific Learn­ing and Solil­o­quy pro­vide tech­nol­ogy solu­tions for edu­ca­tion. The acqui­si­tion will cost SLC about $11 mil­lion and is expected to be com­pleted this month.”

- “Sci­en­tific Learn­ing is the devel­oper of Fast For­Word, a fam­ily of read­ing inter­ven­tion tools tar­geted toward stu­dents who are char­ac­ter­ized as strug­gling learn­ers and designed to develop the required “neu­rocog­ni­tive skills” for read­ing and learn­ing in gen­eral. Solil­o­quy is also a read­ing inter­ven­tion developer.”

Com­ment: this acqui­si­tion con­sol­i­dates Sci­en­tific Learn­ing (NSDQ: SCIL) as the lead­ing com­pany in the edu­ca­tion seg­ment of the brain fit­ness mar­ket. It will be inter­est­ing to track what research gets done on the neural and cog­ni­tive effects of Solil­o­quy, since Sci­en­tific Learning’s Fast For­word is backed by exten­sive literature.

2) Tech­no­me­dia Part­ners With SBT to Accel­er­ate Its Inter­na­tional Expansion

- “Tech­no­me­dia, a Cana­dian provider of tal­ent man­age­ment and human cap­i­tal devel­op­ment solu­tions, announced its part­ner­ship with the SBT (Sci­en­tific Brain Train­ing) group, a Euro­pean provider of train­ing and eval­u­a­tion of cog­ni­tive functions.”

Com­ment: this acqui­si­tion pro­vides SBT an entry point into the North Amer­ica HR ser­vices mar­ket, posi­tion­ing it well for the expected growth in the HR & cor­po­rate train­ing mar­ket focused on cog­ni­tive services.

3) The Brain’s Role in Trad­ing Performance

- “Dr. Gold­berg, co-author of the afore­men­tioned chap­ter, sug­gests that engag­ing in tasks that require use of the frontal lobes may in fact strength their func­tion. This has pro­found impli­ca­tions for the treat­ment of demen­tia and atten­tion deficits and may also play an impor­tant role in improv­ing per­for­mance at such cog­ni­tive tasks as trading. ”

- “Inter­est­ingly, the research cited in Dr. Goldberg’s chap­ter indi­cates that the pre­frontal cor­tex is most involved in tasks that involve nov­elty. Famil­iar tasks that are rou­tine do not require the same kind of atten­tion, con­cen­tra­tion, plan­ning, and judg­ment. It may well be that tack­ling new, unfa­mil­iar chal­lenges is most stim­u­lat­ing to brain devel­op­ment, whereas rou­tine (con­sider the lifestyles of many retired peo­ple) is least likely to enhance cog­ni­tive functioning.”

Com­ment: sound advice by Brett Steen­barger, a lead­ing trad­ing psy­chol­ogy expert. Indeed, there is no need to wait until one has a med­ical prob­lem to start nur­tur­ing our brains…and we are see­ing high-demand occu­pa­tions (mil­i­tary, pro­fes­sional sports, traders) adding new tools to their toolkits.

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